Something gorgeous in Allison's buffoonery

It never takes them long to proclaim their "loyalty". Robinho, exotic shooting star or fashion accessory, depending on one's point of view, kissed the club badge in that shameless manner before Manchester City kicked off against Chelsea, and drew attention to it again when his goal gave them the lead. A year or two from now, when the novelty has worn off, the bouncing Brazilian will be kissing another badge in another city, so gather ye rosebuds while ye may, City fans.

As Chelsea outclassed Manchester's newly-rich other team on Saturday, thoughts turned willingly to a man, 81 years old now, who was a real City man, and is now regarded, if he is regarded at all, as a failure, and a bit of a buffoon. Malcolm Allison's mind has gone, and he spends his days in a care home. Talk about "life's sunless hill". It's terribly sad when you think of the vigorous man he was in his prime, and the coach he was - and, furthermore, the one he might have been.

In drawing up the inventory of his life, it is best to get the silly stuff out of the way at once. The champagne and cigars; the boasting; the women.

The way he used to bump up young players who were barely out of short pants. Ian Bowyer was promoted as the finest centre-forward since Tommy Lawton, and Nicky Reid the fiercest tackler since Dave Mackay. Manchester City, he told anybody who would listen back in 1968, "would terrify Europe". They departed the European Cup in the first round, losing to Fenerbahce, who were not then a force to be reckoned with. There's plenty of evidence to suggest that Allison was indeed a buffoon, and some people have never forgotten.

But there was another man in that skin, the ground-breaking coach who appears in David Tossell's biography, published this week by Mainstream. It is greatly to the credit of the players whose careers Allison transformed, of whom Mike Summerbee, Colin Bell and Francis Lee are the most prominent, that they prefer to recall the questing mind rather than the loud mouth. They have kept close to him in the sad later years, along with Jim Lawton, the journalist who knew him best in his glory days, and their tales are worth hearing.

"If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures," Scott Fitzgerald wrote of Jay Gatsby, "then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life." That assessment could do service for Allison, too. Having spent his teenage years as a Londoner during the second world war, and then been struck by TB, which ended his playing career, he was aware of life's fragility. Maybe the excessive behaviour was a reaction to those deprivations.

The team he shaped with Joe Mercer at Maine Road knew no deprivation where entertainment was concerned. All those discussions he enjoyed with Dave Sexton and others in their days at West Ham brought forth the ripest fruit in the late 60s when City won the Championship, the FA Cup, the League Cup and the European Cup Winners' Cup in three glorious seasons. Then, sadly, he fell out with Mercer, and the superb coach, entrusted with the duties of manager, was undermined by a recklessness that Mercer had done so much to constrain.

What a coach he might have made for England. If, at the height of his reputation, in the summer of 1970, he had succeeded Sir Alf Ramsey as the national manager, how different things might have been in the next decade. There's no way of knowing, of course, but Allison would surely have brought more out of some gifted players than Ramsey did, or the fear-haunted Don Revie, who took over in 1974. Nobody ever said of Allison's players, as Gunther Netzer complained of Ramsey's England hackers in 1972: "Every member of the England team tried to autograph my leg."

He wrote a book, Soccer for Thinkers, which rather gave the game away. By and large people in English football do not like to think, and the national side is significantly poorer for it. Yet Allison had his triumphs, notably his mentoring of the young Bobby Moore, who led England to their greatest triumph in 1966, the year Allison was beginning his great work at Manchester City.

So cheer on the modern, cheque-waving Blues all you like. Like Dusty Springfield, I'd rather see the world the way it used to be. "A little bit of freedom is all we lack. Catch me if you can, I'm going back."

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About this article

Michael Henderson: Something gorgeous in Malcolm Allison's buffoonery

This article appeared on p12 of the Sport section of the Guardian
on Monday 15 September 2008.
It was published on
the Guardian website
at 19.08 EDT on Monday 15 September 2008.
It was last modified at 03.44 EDT on Tuesday 16 September 2008.
It was first published at 20.37 EDT on Monday 15 September 2008.